Trayvon Martin, Twitter's birthday, and a Romney music video -- a week in social media

Trayvon Martin, Twitter's birthday, and a Romney music video -- a week in social media

Almost everyone will miss almost everything discussed on social media. So...here's what was hot last week, including widely shared topics such as the killing of a Florida teen and Twitter's sixth birthday.

Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you--and I--have missed a lot of developments, new products, etc. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts (March 19; March 12; March 5; February 26; February 19) are meant to help you catch up with the ones that do. Wherever I can, I insert Twitter handles so you'll have some new folks to follow. Each week, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me or tweeting with @sree or #sreetips.

The death of Trayvon Martin: This story was hard to miss. Thanks to social media and some crusading journalists, millions of people became aware of the shooting death of an unarmed African-American teenager by a neighborhood watch captain. To see the full extent of social media connections to the story, see this Know Your Meme page. Martin was wearing a hoodie when he was killed, and some have used their own hoodies as a way to bring attention to his killing. The most prominent tweet was this one by basketball superstar Lebron James (@KingJames). It's a photo of him and his Miami Heat teammates, all wearing hoodies. To keep up with developments see this Mother Jones primer by Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) and the Atlantic posts by Ta-Nehesi Coates (@Tanehesi).

If you want to catch up with all the videos you've likely missed, the YouTube Charts page is your one-stop shop--you can sort by most viewed/discussed/liked across categories and across time periods (week/month/all time).

Poynter Week in Review: Here are the most popular stories this week on the journalism site Poynter.org, shared by Julie Moos (@JulieMMoos), the site's director:

My top three: Each week, I post screenshots of my tweets that got the most attention the previous week. I am hoping that, together, we can learn what works and what doesn't on Twitter. I use a free tool called Crowdbooster to identify these. By looking through these, you will also get some ideas of some new people to follow.

The tweet with the most impressions (i.e., the total possible number of times someone could have seen a tweet--the sum of my followers and the followers of my retweeters) was about an unusual Nokia patent:
Credit: Crowdbooster / Screenshot by Sree Sreenivasan/CNET